“Asking Difficult Questions of Well-Intentioned People”: How Amy Costello Investigates the Non-Profit Sector

From PlayPump to Tom’s Shoes, reporter Amy Costello explains how she has revealed the limitations of philanthropic pursuits through artful reporting.

Portrait of Amy Costello from Nonprofit Quarterly

Amy Costello, founder and host of the Tiny Spark podcast, joined our Solutions Journalism class in early October. Costello has reported for NPR, PBS television, the Guardian, the BBC World Service, served as Africa’s correspondent for PRI’s the world, and received an Emmy nomination in 2011 for her television special “Sudan: The Quick and the Terrible.”

In 2011, her years of reporting experience culminated in her founding of Tiny Spark, “a podcast that investigates nonprofits, international aid, and philanthropy,” and was acquired by Non-Profit Quarterly in 2018.

Screenshot of Amy Costello addressing the class through Zoom.

Costello described her job as “asking difficult questions of well-intentioned people.” She went on to address many of the questions that have arisen during our months of studying the successes and limitations of micro-solutions across the globe.

Prior to Costello’s visit, the class read and listened to her piece “Tania Culver Humphrey: The Woman Who ‘Saved Mercy Corps.’” The piece was a follow-up to a prior story about the “Aid Too” movement and the phenomenon of people experiencing sexual violence while on foreign aid trips with little or no action being taken by non-profit administrators. This story featured Tania Culver Humphrey, who spoke about her experience with sexual violence and her approach to addressing the problem within the humanitarian aid organization Mercy Corps. We also listened to Costello’s story “How One Nonprofit Helped Change a Nation’s Thinking about Criminal Justice,” a detailed account of the work of the Innocence Project, as well as its limitations.

According to Costello, the past nine years she’s spent investigating the efficacy and limitations of the non-profit sector were all triggered by one story. In 2005, Costello covered the creation of the now-infamous PlayPump, a failed solution to provide drought-stricken areas of Africa with water, devised by two British and American men. The idea was that by building merry-go-rounds that also served to pump water, people would be able to harness the energy of playing children to solve the labor-intensive act of traditional water pumping.

During her initial coverage of the initiative, Costello said her major fault was a lack of skepticism. She described her talks with the philanthropists who “rolled out the red carpet” and spoke about their project in miraculous terms. At the time, she neglected to question the truth of their statements. Costello’s story, when it aired on PBS’ Frontline/World, was met with an onslaught of donors and endorsements from celebrities and politicians.

Five years later, Costello would come to conduct a follow-up story about PlayPump, one that revealed a sad truth: the project had done more harm than good in the communities where it was implemented. PlayPumps that weren’t built atop moist earth in the first place were practically useless, and in order to pump the number of water philanthropists had claimed they would, children would need to use the merry-go-rounds for 27 hours every day. It was after reporting this follow-up story that Costello started Tiny Spark, a podcast dedicated to investigating the realities of the non-profit sector.

Students asked how Costello approached interview subjects to ask about the limitations of their work, Costello offered the tip of de-personalizing the criticism. Instead of asking “Is your project unsustainable?,” for example, Costello suggests asking “What would you say to the people who are concerned that this project won’t be sustainable?”

Costello also recommended that reporters not just visit the site of a project, such as the PlayPump, when donors and philanthropists have had time to prepare, but to also “show up when nobody is expecting you.” By investigating a scene this way, reporters can minimize the risk of being misled by artificial setups, or alterations made ahead of time.

When asked why Costello chooses to report on the shortcomings of non-profits, rather than the more blatantly corrupt corporations of the world, Costello responded that philanthropy is “a business like any other” and one which has “billions of dollars flowing through it, nationally and abroad, with no oversight.” Costello used her coverage of Tom’s Shoes as an example, which revealed that the supposedly charitable business was created as a solution to a problem that didn’t exist: shoelessness in Africa.

The offerings that Costello brought to our class were ones that have inspired an ongoing conversation in our class ever since. As student solutions journalists, Costello offered us the lessons that she had to learn through experience, encouraging us to always keep a healthy dose of skepticism in our practices, regardless of our assumptions.